Remember when birthdays were giddy excitement, party hats and toys, toys, toys? Now they’re like unwelcome reminders of a bill due sooner or later. And given the postmark on my latest birthday, it’s leaning more towards sooner. So, I got to thinking, what’s old? It’s a fallacy to go by our culture’s definition since the word itself must be avoided at all costs. We’re senior citizens, older adults, mature. Me? I’m straight-up old and just fine with that.
But there’s young-old and old-old and they have nothing to do with chronology. It’s not about being physically active and relatively wrinkle-free or, alternatively, liver-spotted and hobbling around on a cane. In my opinion, the first symptom of old-old is that creeping judgment of youth, the growing certainty that they’re doing it all wrong. And where is it most obvious?
“You call that music??” Hip hop is music. And emo, EDM, ska, death metal and a lot of other genres I wouldn’t particularly care to listen to but understand it speaks to kids today like the Kinks and Moody Blues did to me many decades ago. And I’d also venture to say that rap lyrics are a hell of a lot harder to write and perform than even the best of Iron Butterfly. “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” right?
“But the lyrics! Filthy!” Remember when Ed Sullivan demanded the Rolling Stones change “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together,” because the former was too suggestive? And Mick, bless his heart, promised he would and then didn’t? And remember when that same TV show would only film Elvis from the waist up because his gyrating was considered lewd and suggestive?
We forget that music and dance is created by and for that age group with raging hormones. Hormones which, for me and my peers, no longer rage. And haven’t been for a while.
“What is with those pants hanging around their knees?” I was maybe 15 years old when, one day, I happened to glance out the window and saw my dad carrying a pair of jeans—mine—at the end of a stick to the burn barrel. It was cool at the time to wear Levis as long as possible without washing so they’d get this nice, greasy sheen. Mine had reached stellar condition, I thought. My father thought otherwise. And oh, how his generation hated hair streaming down backs of young men or scandalously short skirts on women.
“They don’t know how to write or spell!” So says one who gets a text from their grandchild that goes something like, “hey g how ru me idk.” Linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores in her book, Because Internet (2019, Riverhead Books), how the internet has sped up the evolution of language. Rules of grammar, punctuation and words themselves continually change but the old-olds remain fossilized in how it used to be.
“Glued to their screens! Social media is destroying true connection with others!” The printing press was invented in 1440, followed quickly by religious leaders condemning books now available to everyone as “the devil’s work.” Social critics bemoaned the arrival of Alexander Bell’s invention, convinced telephones would destroy the practice of visiting old friends. One can draw a timeline from hieroglyphics to AI with one common thread shared by old-olds: technophobia.
In some people’s opinions, kids today are ill-mannered, uneducated, lazy and will be the death of civilization. Some people are also tiresome in their unoriginality.
4th century BCE* “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life… they think they know everything and are always quite sure about it.” Aristotle
20 BCE “Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.” Horace.
1330-1332 “Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased… the ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened.” Essays in Idleness Yoshida Kenkō
1925 “We defy anyone who goes about with his eyes open to deny that there is, as never before, an attitude on the part of young folk, which is best described as grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish.” The Conduct of Young People, Hull Daily Mail, 1925
I’m all for clutching our pearls over the state of affairs today. But I think the cause may be found closer to home, not down the street with the baggy-pants teen.
[Ed Note: For those of us near- troglodytes. BC and AD are now BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era)
Kelly Luker is a former investigative reporter and criminal defense investigator. She presently lives in Ajijic.
- You Call that Music? - October 29, 2024
